LIRR bathroom stowaways a stubborn problem amid fare evasion crackdown

LIRR rider Stuart Greenberg for years shared his morning Ronkonkoma train with a commuter he called "Mr. Regularity." As soon as the man boarded, he headed for the bathroom, and wouldn’t come out until a ticket collector passed.

Greenberg suspects the rider's onboard routine had less to do with nature calling than getting a free ride.

"I'm paying several hundred dollars a month for a monthly ticket, and this guy has never paid," said Greenberg, of Coram. "That's thousands of dollars a year."

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has increasingly tried to clamp down on fare evasion, including through charging riders for late e-ticket activation, making tickets expire sooner and using police to remove nonpaying customers. But bathroom stowaways remain a stubborn problem on the LIRR, and one that may never be flushed for good.

As long as the LIRR collects fares by having conductors walk trains to check tickets, some riders will try to avoid paying, said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, who believes bathroom fare skippers are a particularly determined bunch.

"You have to have a very strong stomach to do that," Daglian said.

Several LIRR commuters interviewed reported regularly seeing passengers lock themselves in train restrooms to avoid paying fares. While some dismissed the behavior as relatively harmless, others expressed outrage over fellow passengers riding free, while also keeping them from using the facilities.

Waiting for his West Hempstead-bound train to pull out of Grand Central Madison, Glenn Yankwitt, of Oceanside, said he isn't that bothered by bathroom hiders, if it's just one at a time. 

"As long as they wash their hands when they come out, I’m OK with it," he said.

Herman Lim, of Syosset, said he gets "suspicious" whenever passengers exit a train restroom just as the train pulls up to their destination. The behavior irks him, especially given the high cost of an LIRR train ticket. A peak one-way ticket between Syosset and Grand Central now costs $15.25, up from $14.50 last year.

"If you take the railroad, you should pay for it," said Lim, who doesn't believe ticket-buying riders should subsidize those riding for free.

Fare beaters holing up in bathrooms isn’t unique to the LIRR, according to Gareth Armitage, who recently rode the LIRR out of Grand Central while on vacation from England. He works for the United Kingdom’s Southern Railway, checking tickets on trains, and has to deal with fare-evading "toilet riders" in the "toilet class, as we call it." 

"It is all around the world," he said. "If something’s free, you’re going to try it."

Asked about the problem at a Manhattan news conference Thursday, MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said conductors are often notified about restroom riders by other passengers frustrated "they don't have access to the facilities."

"Putting aside the fare evasion, we want bathrooms to be available to our customers," Lieber said.

Anthony Simon, who heads the LIRR conductors’ union, said train crew members use their judgment when confronted with a passenger in a restroom for an inordinately long time. A conductor won’t enter a locked bathroom unless the occupant is in distress or calling for help, Simon said.

"You have to be delicate with that. You have to knock. You have to check. You have to see if they’re OK. That’s the first thing you do. ‘Everybody OK in there?’" Simon said.

In certain situations, he said MTA police and railroad management intercept bathroom riders when they disembark a train.

"Management will make a decision as to whether they’re scamming or not," Simon said. "If they’re willing to pay, they pay for their ticket, and we’ll go about our business."

Fare evasion crackdown

Police have been more hands-on when it comes to fare evasion since the MTA in 2024 adopted a policy of ejecting passengers that refuse to pay, rather than giving them paper IOUs, said Joseph Pugliese, president of the MTA Police Benevolent Association. 

"When we show up now, the policy is the person has to be removed from the train, they are identified, and they’re run for warrants," Pugliese said.

The new policy has helped reduce train delays and assaults on LIRR conductors arising from prolonged fare disputes, Pugliese said. But it's contributed to a rise in police on-duty injuries from officers having to "sometimes physically remove" passengers who refuse to pay, including those in locked bathrooms.

The MTA, in 2023, said the LIRR lost nearly $25 million a year in uncollected fares. But several initiatives enacted in recent years, including new ticket rules adopted last month, have helped cut down on fare evasion on the LIRR "dramatically," Lieber told state lawmakers at a Feb. 3 budget hearing.

The ticket policies enacted in January reduced how long one-way tickets are valid, from two months to one day, and also imposed an $8 surcharge for riders who repeatedly fail to activate mobile tickets before boarding.

The changes eliminate the incentive for riders to avoid the conductor so they can reuse the ticket, Lieber said.

'Down on their luck'

But, Gerard Bringmann, chairman of the LIRR Commuter Council, said the kind of scofflaws who would go so far as to hide in a train bathroom "are generally people who weren’t going to pay their fares anyway." And so Bringmann expects the MTA’s crackdown on fare evasion will have little or no impact on passengers in the potty.

"It’s not like your regular commuters are going to do that," Bringmann said. "It’s people who are down on their luck and are trying to grab a free ride from one place to another."

Because income status is a contributing factor to fare evasion, Daglian, who sat on a 2023 MTA advisory panel on fare evasion, said any plan to reduce fare beaters must also consider how to increase access to cheaper transit.

While increasing prices by an average of 4% in January, the MTA also expanded the $1 Family Fare to children up to 17, and extended discounts for seniors and riders with disabilities. Daglian would like to see a government-subsidized LIRR discount program for low-income riders, similar to New York City's Fair Fares initiative, which discounts bus and subway rides by 50%.

Although dealing with fare evasion can be as messy as an LIRR bathroom on a Friday night, Daglian believes "the larger overall response should be, how can we make it more affordable for people to ride trains so they don't have to look at this as an option?"